Tutorial: How to Sell Games as Shareware

This is a really bare bones guide to selling shareware. I wrote this funny post on the GMC, making fun of all the crazy make money through games guides that appear in the distribution forum on that site, but a couple of people asked for a more in-depth guide, so here it is. Again, this is really introductory, there are thousands of things to learn about selling shareware, and no one tutorial could cover it all. This is based on my experience selling Immortal Defense as shareware.

As I said in that guide, the first thing to do is learn how to make games by creating finished, polished freeware games. If your games get downloads around 50,000+, you could probably have the raw game-making ability to succeed shareware developer. I created freeware games for 15 years before starting with shareware, and you really need to do that. You can't just jump right in to making a commercial game if you don't know how to make games.

But let's assume you've done that: you can make great games, but don't know how to get into shareware. That's who this guide might be useful to.

Make the Game Itself

I'm not going to describe how to make a game here, as that's beyond this article's scope. If you're used to freeware, a shareware game works almost the same way, with one exception: you need to separate the game into demo and full version.

Whether or not to use DRM is also beyond the scope of this tutorial, I take the simpler route and use separate full and demo versions of the game. Piracy is going to happen either way, but with separate versions at least they need to find the full version of the game rather than just use a keygen or a crack to bypass the DRM.

A "nag screen" in the demo that asks the player to buy the game if they've enjoyed it helps a lot, too. Just don't make it too annoying, that'd turn people away more than attract them. A simple description of the features of the full version (number of levels, etc.) is fine.

There are differing schools of thought about long or short demos, with most people saying short demos are better. I reject those and prefer long demos: the demo of Immortal Defense is about one-third of the full game, and you can play it for hours and hours before you come to the end of it. I don't know if that works better or not, but it seemed to work for old shareware games like Jazz Jackrabbit and Doom and the like.

I recommend making games in genres you enjoy, and games you like to play. There's really no reason to make a game in a genre just because that genre sells well. Although it's true that some genres sell better than others at any given time, that fluctuates constantly, and any game genre can sell well if the game is good enough, and games are more authentic when they're games the author made out of love for that type of game.

It also may be good idea to make the game as a team with talented friends (if you have any) rather than alone -- you'd have to share some of the profit of course, but it's better to keep some of 1000 sales than keep all of 100 sales. And unless you're equally great at programming, graphics, music, and all the rest, you probably should find a specialist in the areas you're weak in.

Make the Website

Hosting can be acquired fairly cheaply, I recommend using pay-as-you-go hosting services like Nearly Free Speech, or Amazon S3, because in some cases it might only cost you a few dollars a year and shared servers like 1&1, Dreamhost, etc. tend to be slower, and I don't like their deceptive practice of overselling bandwidth.

Creating the website itself can be done from scratch (using html, css, etc.) or you can use a free content management system like Drupal (which is what I use). Just make sure the theme you use is free for commercial use (many of them specify that you can't use the theme for commercial sites). Or you can make your own theme by starting with one and editing its css.

You can make your site simple: just some screenshots, a description, and a link to the buy page, and your email; or you can make it ornate, with trailers, forums, a blog, a newsletter, links to reviews of the game, a soundtrack page, a page for mods, and so on. That's up to you, I've seen both methods work. Many games sell way better than mine and don't have forums or a blog or anything.

Use an E-Commerce Service Provider

You will also need an e-commerce service provider like BMT-Micro (which I use), Plimus, or eSellerate. These are very simple to use, you just register, put your game on there, upload the full version of your game to it, choose its price, and it gives you a link to their shopping cart. They take around 10%, but process credit cards and automatically send the game to someone when they buy it. Important to note is that e-commerce services do not require any upfront money, they only take a small percent, so you can start one up at no cost.

You technically *can* just use PayPal, but even PayPal takes a fee, and it doesn't automatically send a file to someone when they purchase it, you'd need to do that yourself, causing a delay. But if you only send a handful of copies a day and you're not afraid your customers would get angry at having to wait hours or in some cases days before they get what they paid for, you can use PayPal. There are scripts which allow you to automatically send a link to the full version to someone when they buy something from you on PayPal, but I haven't investigated or used those.

Once you have the game, the website, and the e-commerce provider set up -- you might think you're done, but actually you're only halfway there!

Marketing On Release

Marketing is probably the hardest part of this. You don't need to (and actually shouldn't at first) spend any money on marketing, there are a tons of ways to market a game for free, but they all require time and effort.

First you should announce the game's release and submit the game for review. There are a lot of places to announce your game, but the main two are via forum posts and via press releases.

If you're posting about it on forums, don't sign up to a forum just to post about it, but do post about it on every forum you regularly post on anyway. If you have a MySpace, Facebook, LiveJournal, etc., then of course you should announce it in those places as well.

To send out a press release, you can either purchase a press release service (like the ones discussed here by TeeGee), or you can use a lot of time gathering the contact emails of various game sites. You also need to learn the format that press releases are written in (just read some game release press releases on sites like GamePress) and write one in that style, the format exists for a reason and you shouldn't play around with it too much.

You can also submit your site to various software repositories, like Download.com and thousands of others. To do that, you should create a PAD file for your game (which is a file with various information about your game), using a program like PADGen. This isn't as essential as it used to be, and many people ignore this, but you should at least submit your game to the bigger sites. Generally speaking, if a site is going to get you at least 100 downloads of your game, it's probably worth submitting to, if not, it probably isn't. There are also websites and software which will submit your PAD file and game to thousands of software downloading sites, but I haven't used them so I'm not sure that's more worthwhile than just doing it manually by hand.

You also should contact reviewers individually, offering review copies in exchange for a review. There aren't too many sites that review indie games exclusively (like Tim W's Blog and Game Tunnel), so most of your reviews should come from sites that review games in general. Send friendly reminders asking for reviews until they outright reject you, but don't pester them, journalists are busy and they can't review every single game.

Track Statistics

It's a good idea to use a website tracking system like Google Analytics to track how many people are visiting your game's site each day, how many of those people download the demo, and other such numbers.

Using those numbers you can determine the game's conversion rate: the number of people who buy the game per download (typically around 0.5% for average games to 1.5% for very good games). If your conversion rate is below that, you probably need to improve your game some more. If you have a good conversion rate but not many downloads, you need to work more on marketing.

The goal should be to increase the daily traffic to your website, and that can be done in thousands of different ways, but you don't just want any old traffic, you want people who would be interested in buying games. Getting a ton of people from 4chan to visit your site for example won't help you much.

Tracking statistics is also helpful for SEO (search engine optimization), because it lets you know how your site is found in Google and other search engines. You can then optimize your site for those keywords to increase organic search engine traffic.

Currently my traffic is only around 100-200 hits per day, which is very low, but reaching even that can be difficult, but without tracking statistics you'd have no idea what it was, you can't improve something that you can't see.

Continuous Marketing

There will be a short burst of a lot of marketing effort when the game is first released, but you also need to continuously market it after that, to keep your traffic up. Reviews and announcements provide bursts of traffic, but little long-term traffic, so you might see most of your sales in the first month and then almost nothing after that unless you continuously market it.

It's usually a good idea to use game forums regularly, contribute positively to the discussions there, and to link to your site in your signature, but because forums can be time-wasters don't do this too much. Similarly, you can leave comments on blogs with links to your site. And again, don't spam or try to mention your game at every opportunity, just contribute to the discussion. Although don't be so humble that you never mention your game at all, either; if it's relevant to the discussion and adds to it, it can be mentioned without seeming like spam. These small links might seem like nothing, but they add up if there's enough of them. Most of the traffic to my game's site actually comes from people clicking on links in blog comments or forums.

Optimally, at least once a day you should do some little thing to help your marketing, because there are far more free ways to increase traffic to your site than you'll ever have time to attempt. It'd be tedious to list them all, but perhaps I'll list a few that I've used in future entries. Use what works and what is interesting to do.

In order to succeed with marketing I believe you have to enjoy it, it should be fun. Don't think of it as selfish, because if your game really is good, if you believe it's valuable to people, you are kind of providing them a service by letting them know about it. A good rule of thumb when deciding how to market is: if you'd be annoyed or put off by a marketing method if you saw someone else using it, don't use that method.

Advertising generally isn't a good idea unless you take very accurate measurements and learn exactly which advertising pays for itself, and which loses money. I don't think it hurts if you spend a little bit on it, though. As I described earlier in this blog, I use Project Wonderful.

Miscellaneous

Make sure you act professionally. When answering emails (and always answer emails promptly), type grammatically, be polite, don't insult people, etc. -- if that's not your basic personality, that might cause problems. Some people are naturally jerks, those people tend not to be very good at dealing with customer service. Most people don't actually know how impolite they are, though. So here's an easy measure: if you have ever called you a troll by more than one person on any given forum, you probably shouldn't handle your own customer service. :)

It also may help to use affiliation: this is where you offer some other person or site a percent of the profits in order for them to mention, list, or market your game. With e-commerce services this is easy to set up, most of them do it automatically as an opt-in option. The percent can vary widely. Some larger portals can take up to 75% to sell your game for you, whereas smaller sites might be happy with 30%. A lot of casual indie game developers make money primarily or even exclusively through this manner, and don't sell directly or market the game themselves, although I don't think that practice is a good idea long-term.

This may seem like an overwhelming amount of work, and it's just the start. But don't let that scare you off, it's actually far easier to do than I feared it would be before I did it. I thought it'd be completely overwhelming, but it was actually quite easy. There have been months where I didn't do any marketing work at all, and still got a few hundred dollars, so passive streams of income like this can be very useful, even if you don't want to do this for a living.

Don't expect your first game to sell very well, you'll just be learning. It's probably not until shareware game five or six that you'll have enough experience in marketing to do well. Shareware games typically sell for years, so once you have completed a library of them the individual sales add up. So don't get depressed if your first game has only a couple of sales a month, that's a good start.

I'm still learning myself, there are others who know a lot more about this than I do, and some of them hang out on the Indiegamer Forums. I recommend reading through most of the threads there, especially in the Business forum, and asking them questions, since, as I said, no one tutorial can cover everything you need to know.